


Masters of Men

by wanda von dunayev (wandavon)



Category: Warcraft - All Media Types
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Canon, F/F, High Elves, Quel'Delar - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 21:39:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1564994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wandavon/pseuds/wanda%20von%20dunayev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like the Sister Blade, Vereesa is a weapon who chooses her wielder.</p><p>Alternate Canon in which Vereesa Windrunner is the bearer of Quel'Delar. Takes place shortly before Patch 5.2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Masters of Men

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: This work contains references to past domestic abuse.

Vereesa could never recreate the moment of Rhonin’s death, though she imagined it often. 

She had plenty of opportunity to do so on the voyage from Pandaria’s mainland. The sky outside her porthole was a sheet of iron, and lightning cracked between clouds heavy as forge smoke. For nine days now a storm had ridden with them, snapping and shrinking their sails. Their ship bounced; dawn and sunset turned the sea to molten lead, and the waves were saronite tipped with fire.

A loathsome trip. Warmage Yurias had been in bed for a week, retching, and even Vereesa felt unsteady on her feet. But when the wind picked up and the masts creaked, Jaina Proudmoore smiled for the first time in what seemed like weeks. 

“It reminds me of home,” she said. Her hair was storm-tossed, and her eyes were ablaze with something more than memory. 

It made Vereesa remember as well. She remembered her two boys, left safe in Dalaran while she went running off on this fool’s errand. Giramar had put on a brave face, but Galadin had cried and clung to her. His hair was red like Rhonin’s, but thick and glossy. An elf’s hair. She had wept as well, but her tears fell into it where no one could see. _Halduron Brightwing does not cry, and I will not either._

Lightning flashed again and thunder rolled over it, half a heartbeat later. The storm was atop them. Jaina had a mariner’s blood, but Vereesa did not. Drowning was a cruel death. And her sons would be orphans.

* * *

Was the day he died like this? Did the clouds part and dissolve? Did light pour in from the cracks that split wood, stone, flesh? Did the darkness gape before him, seconds from the end? Did he think of her? Did he think, dying, of her, and the mad folly of trust that had led him to that place, that fate? Did he regret what it and everything had come to? 

 _I regret it._ The thunder rolled and the ship bucked and Vereesa tightened her hand into a fist against her sheets. _I regret your choices enough for both of us._  

* * *

Vereesa shared a cabin with Modera, who was seated in her hammock, reading and oblivious to the storm. Occasionally the pages of her book stopped shifting, and Vereesa detected a change in the air. _It is her breathing_ , she decided. _She holds her breath when she looks at me._ Modera was subtle indeed, but she was still human. 

She had thought once that she understood humans, their strange foibles and concerns, their short lives and keen, keenly selective memories. And their laughter. So free and so easy. In Quel’Thalas the laughter had always been soft, restrained, polite, unless it was scornful.

Rhonin made her laugh as no one else had. She had not laughed since he died. _I’ll laugh when I’m carrying Aethas Sunreaver’s dripping head. I’ll laugh and spit in his face when I mount it atop the Violet Citadel._

Rhonin would not approve, but Rhonin was dead. A man lives, then doesn’t. The narrow line between the two was sharper than any blade she carried, scything through her now with its bleakness. 

And then, as if just recalling the thought to herself, she touched Quel’delar. Beneath her fingers, beneath its sheath, it sang, and the tune was mournful and comforting both. 

* * *

“You are staring,” Vereesa said the fourth time Modera looked at her.

“Your beauty only.” Modera did not miss a beat. “Were you sisters as lovely?”

 _She says that because she knows it weakens me._ “Their hair was more golden. And they were more beautiful than I am.” Sylvanas in particular had had a rare beauty, the sort of beauty that made men stare in the street. “You talk about them as if they are dead. You can say what you mean.”

Modera shrugged. “Dead, lost, or traitors. Friends drop like flies nowadays, it sometimes seems.”

Modera had the faintest of accents, a mountain accent of gargled ‘r’s and round vowels. Rhonin had had the utmost respect for her. “I would trust Modera with my life,” he said often. “I would trust her with my children’s lives.”

And yet. And yet Modera had argued against Vereesa in the matter of the Sunreavers, eloquently, at length, untiring. Vereesa had studied her face the night they watched prisoners file into the Violet Hold. Modera’s expression was gently sorrowing. It did not flicker. And her mouth did not open in protest.

Vereesa was the one staring now, but Modera looked at the sword by her side. “It’s a magnificent blade.”

“It’s the greatest blade ever wrought,” Vereesa said without pride. They had toasted her in the Silver Covenant, and she was told that Aurora Skycaller wept with joy when she heard. Even sweeter had been the stunned disbelief in Lor’themar Theron’s eyes, the impotent fury in Rommath’s. Yet all that had been dust and ash compared to the beauty of the sword itself, curving into her fingers as her children had once curved into her arms.

The corners of Modera’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “And it chose you. That must make you the greatest of Silvermoon’s children.”

 _Am I?_ She was certainly greater than the parasites that crouched there now. She would have given the title to Renthar Hawkspear, but he, too, was gone, and Matron Aurora with him. _Dead, lost, or traitors._ She stroked the sword’s hilt and found it warm.

Modera wrapped her arms around her knees. “You seem troubled. Are you thinking that the blade will soon drink the blood of your kin?”

Vereesa withdrew her hand as if burnt. “I have three kinsmen,” she said. “My sons, and my nephew. Quel’delar can drink its fill of the rest of them.”

The lie would not fit comfortably in her mouth, and she almost expected Modera to say so. But she said nothing, and examined her hands as if Vereesa’s blood thirst embarrassed her.

Vereesa looked away as well. She was of an age with Modera, old for a human, young for an eld. But Modera did not look old. Her face was a girl’s, bright-eyed and smooth-cheeked, and her hair, though pure white, was thick, wavy, and it made the gold of her skin shine darker. _She is beautiful too._

* * *

Vereesa ate alone that night, as she always did. She thought of her boast and imagined Quel’delar’s runes glowing beneath a sheet of blood. It would be sweet to find hand-to-hand again against a foe that she could see, feel, strike. Skin had a tangibility to it that her memories and grief did not. She would cut them all down: Aethas Sunreaver first, then his pets. The world would be better for a few less snakes in it.

Her thoughts circled to Halduron and his Farstriders, and she clenched her jaw so tightly her teeth ached. By her side the sword was as cold and stiff as an angry lover. It so often was, when she thought of killing sin’dorei.

When she drew it, the blade was frigid under her fingers. It did not care for her fine distinctions.  “I’m sorry,” she said in Thalassian. As if it could understand. 

Still, she placed it in bed beside her that night without sheathing it. No elf-blade would cut its wielder. She fell asleep stroking its smooth fuller, so cold it clung to her skin. It hurt, but it was a good hurt, and soothing.

In her dream she was back in Dalaran, and Rhonin was alive. He lay alongside her in bed. His skin was rough, there were wiry hairs between his legs. She felt them, laughing at him, because it was coarse and no elven man had them and his strangeness was a delight to her. Just as his familiarity was a comfort.

He kissed her throat and face and breasts, then spread her legs and lowered his tongue to her. She pressed on leg over his shoulder, stroked his red hair back from his eyes and stared down at him. Not beautiful. Beloved.

The pain in her hand woke her. She jerked her fingers away, touched them and found them sticky. The air smelled damp and coppery. Her sheets were stiff with blood, and her hammock beneath them. When she looked on the floor, there were red spots on the wood, red punctuation marks. Even in the darkness they were brilliant.

Quel’delar quivered, trembled, throbbed. The runes were glowing again, pink where her blood seeped into the metal. That, too, was real, more real than her longing dreams. The lesson was unmistakable. Awake, or be cut.

Rhonin had learned that the hard way. He had lived in his dreams: dreams of a free, neutral Dalaran, a bastion of learning. He had been the one who had overruled her on the matter of the Horde, and neither her reasoning nor her fury nor her pain could sway him.

And how had that turned out? _He is dead, and I am alone. My people are scattered, my home is closed to me, and I am the last one who remembers what it is to be quel’dorei._ This was her fate, and none other’s. She must bear all the ugliness without flinching so that one day her sons would not have to.

The sword grew warm under her hands. It approved of Vereesa’s resignation, as it had once approved of her human husband’s death.  

* * *

The light of morning was sickly green-grey. She would not look out the porthole at the clouds like bruises above the ship. She had visited this place in her nightmares. The scouring wind had torn her apart as she stood in Theramore, the sea and sky both burning with her burning skin.

Inside their cabin the walls glowed like a conch, and Vereesa’s head and hand throbbed. It was bright enough to see that she had made a mess of her fingers. At least an inch of skin had peeled away, a loose flap that would need stitches. 

 _Not me. Quel’delar._ So much for an elf-blade not cutting the hand that carried it.

Narasi Snowdawn tended it for her, and when Vereesa told her how she had come by the wound, Snowdawn looked at her like she was a fool. “These swords have a mind of their own,” she said. She had heated her needle over a blue flame and it flashed as she worked. “You could have lost your arm.”

“They’re loyal to their wielders.”

Snowdawn paused. “To the elven people.”

“We are the elven people.”

“It’s a sword, not a philosopher.” Snowdawn was giving her a furtive look, blinking quickly as if nervous. She had green eyes, Vereesa realized. _Real_ green, like Alleria’s had been. “I’ve been considering this, actually. Do you—do you think that sword has ever killed an elf?”

“It’s a sword.” She knew where this was going, and it angered her.

“Vereesa, it is a gift and a symbol, and I can name no other who deserves it more, but I don’t trust it, and you shouldn’t either. What if you have to actually fight? What if it decides that it would rather sacrifice you than see more dead elves?”

“Well, what then?” She tried to sound dry, amused, but the words came out scornful. Her own bitterness shocked her.

“It would be a simple thing to shift its balance, weaken the metal, make it stiffer or more flexible.” Snowdawn pressed her lips together. “These things are possible. You know it.”

With her good hand, Vereesa reached to her side and fumbled the sword out of its sheathe. In the light of the crystals it glowed, bright as ice or glass.

They admired it together, neither speaking.

“The blade is steel,” Vereesa said at last. “An alloy of steel and tempered saronite. The hilt is gilded, the grip is leather, the pommel sapphire set in ivory. This pattern—“ she brushed her thumb across the cross-guard, “is in pearls. And not a single inch of it is alive. It’s a sword. If I need it to menace, it will menace. If I need it to cut, it will cut. And if I need it to kill, then by the Sunwell, it will kill.”

Snowdawn looked away. “You know it is more than that.”

It was even harder to slide it back into the sheath than it was to slide it out, but Vereesa managed. “As you said. It’s a gift and a symbol. And every day I am grateful for it. So grateful I’ll do our enemies the honour of letting them die on its edge.” She directed a pointed look at her hand. “Are you nearly done, sister?”

But later, as she stood on the deck and watched the sea boil beneath her, she wondered. The waves were the same dirty grey as a winter field, so thick and heavy for a moment she was reminded of Northren with its taigas. Quel’Thalas was the land of eternal summer, eternal beauty, yet the changing seasons had fascinated her. She’d delighted in walking when the snow was powdery and tormented Rhonin with snowballs. 

“A Farstrider’s living target,” he’d said, scooping snow out of the neck of his cloak. “It hardly seems just, with your aim.”

“Life isn’t just,” Vereesa had said sweetly.

“Well, you said it,” said Rhonin, and summoned a snowball the circumference of a cart’s tire to engulf her. Snow poured into every gap in her armour. She’d laughed even while she cursed him.

The sailors shouted at her to be gone. Vereesa ignored them as best she could until finally she could not. The hold stank of vomit and dirty bodies and bad food. She wondered if there were rats, then decided she would not think about it.

Modera was reading again. Vereesa ignored her to sit in her own hammock, pulling off her gloves and inspecting the coarse black stitches in her hand. Then she drew the sword and looked at it, too. It was an inert thing now. Perhaps it was chastened. Perhaps she only imagined it could feel.

 _It was Snowdawn’s own doubts she was expressing, nothing more._ Well, Snowdawn could do that—that was her luxury. But Vereesa could not afford to falter, could never afford it. Early in his tenure Sunreaver had approached Vereesa in the Violet Citadel, his guards behind him. His helm was off and his hair was loose over his back, and his face was lovely as the faces of her people were, only his eyes were poison and she loathed them. As he loathed her.

“What do you want of me, traitor?” she asked him.

“That is so amusing.” He glowered. “You call me a traitor, but our people are dying off  and your answer was to bring more half-breeds into the world.”

The words had gone under her skin as if he’d flayed her, but Vereesa forced herself to laugh. “What, should I have birthed _your_ sons?” she asked. His responding flush was answer enough.

 _I was never a person to any of them. Just a broodmare. A bad broodmare who bred false._ She slammed the sword back into its sheath.

“Are you quite alright?” Modera asked. Her eyes flicked downwards. “What in the name of the Light did you do to your hand?”

“A flesh wound, nothing more.” 

Modera gave a sympathetic grimace. “A ghastly one.”

“My hand slipped sharpening my sword.”

“Oh?” Her fingers paused on the page. “I hadn’t thought such a blade needed honing.”

Vereesa watched her, her kind distant eyes. It was said now that Jaina had become unpredictable, dangerous to the Alliance, yet Vereesa understood her as well as she understood anyone. Modera she did not understand. Modera knew too much and divulged too little. Modera was more dangerous than anyone else on the Six, for Modera moved in her own world, and that world was shuttered. 

“It doesn’t,” Vereesa said. She did not elaborate. 

Modera nodded, but she did not go back to her book. “We should be arriving within a few weeks, according to the captain. Are you ready?”

“I was born ready to serve the Alliance.”

“And to kill your kin?” There was a line between Modera’s eyebrows. “That, too?”

 _This again?_ “You are not an elf. I fail to see how it’s your concern.”

“I merely want to be sure you won’t falter.”

“I have never faltered.” She spat the words. “It was you who argued to bring the Horde into Dalaran. Perhaps it’s _your_ soft heart we should question.”

Modera cocked her head. “Oh, Vereesa. You can’t hold that—“ 

“Ranger-General.” _I am not your friend._

Modera’s pale eyebrows rose, but she seemed more amused than offended. “Shall I have you call me ‘my lady’, then?”

“As you wish.”

Modera sighed. “I wish for you to trust me.”

 _I don’t._ “You do your duty. I will do mine.”

“As you say.” The incline of her head was mocking. “I have never faltered.”

Vereesa turned away, overcome with pique. It was a struggle to put on her gloves, and she could feel Modera’s eyes on her all the while. 

She left the unsheathed sword on her bed. _Fall on it,_ she thought savagely, though she did not know to whom. 

* * *

It was dark by the time she had regained her composure. She stayed out for as long as she could bear the driving wind and rain. It was not that she was inclined to stumble or fall so much as that her entire body was soaked and leaden, her hair stringy.

Modera met her on the stairs just as she was heading down. “I was coming up to look for you,” she said.

“It’s too dangerous up there,” Vereesa said. Her clothing scratched at her skin, and her stitches itched beneath her wet glove.

“But not for you,” Modera said.

Vereesa gave her a level look and pushed past her towards their shared cabin. She had not taken three steps when Modera spoke from behind her. “Ranger-General, about what I said earlier.”

She paused, turned. Modera had laced her fingers together and was studying the planks behind Vereesa’s head. There were tense lines on her forehead—unusual. “Forgive me,” she said. “I shouldn’t have pried. I am sometimes too nosy.”

“Thank you,” Vereesa said. Apologies still caught her off-guard. No elven sorcerer would have done it. She gestured at the door to their cabin. “Shall we?”

“Of course.” Modera stepped around her. For such a lovely and composed woman, Modera had an awkward gait, all bounce and swinging arms. It somehow made Vereesa like her better.

Inside, she shut the door behind them. Their cabin was cramped, long and narrow, two hammocks opposite each other and a porthole, opaque with grime, at the far end. The already-scant room was taken up by protruding bulkheads, awkwardly placed pillars, supports. By the standards of the ship it was luxurious, and only Jaina, who had been given the captain’s quarters, could boast better.

Vereesa chose to stand by the porthole, leaning against the wall and bending her legs so as not to hit her head off the ceiling. Modera, who was even taller than she, had to stand in an awkward half-bow, but she did not complain.

“I hope you can excuse me,” said Modera. “I—“ 

“Leave it.” Vereesa waved her hand. “I understand your curiosity. You’re not the first to think me…”

“Cold?” Modera prompted. She was not smiling, but for the first time her gaze was warm. “Indifferent?”

“Inhuman,” said Vereesa, and she herself smiled. 

Modera flushed and laughed, awkward. “Perhaps you have caught me. I don’t understand your people as well as I might hope, I confess it.”

“My people? Or me?” She ran her hand over the beam, and the wood snagged her gloves. “We are individuals. And I don’t understand you, either.”

“What is there not to understand? I serve Dalaran and the Six. I am an old woman who looks young, because I am also a vain sorceress.” Her face dimpled when she smiled—a true smile. “And I have always yearned for a free city in which sorcerers like me can live and work and play and learn in peace. _That_ is why I was Sunreaver’s friend, since you asked.”

Vereesa stayed silent, weighing words in her mind. Only when she was decided did she speak. “I’m sorry also,” she said. “I shouldn’t have thrown that in your face.”

Modera patted her arm, comforting, but said nothing.

Vereesa found she could no longer tolerate her soaked clothing: oppressively tight, all bunches and awkward synthetics. And a wet cut would not heal.

She gestured at herself, eyebrows raised, and Modera spread her hands in acceptance. 

The leather clung to her skin as she pulled it off, and where the water had wrinkled it it left deep furrows in her arms and legs. She spoke as she undressed. “You talked about prying. Let me ask you a prying question, without any ill-will this time.”

“‘Why did you argue on behalf of the Sunreavers in the first place?’” Modera said.

Vereesa looked up. The dim stormy light washed over Modera’s face, made it ash. You could see pores and blemishes, fine lines around her mouth that not even magic could hide. That had always fascinated Vereesa. Elven women’s skin was uniformly smooth. “Yes.”

“Perhaps I wanted to do the right thing.”

There were no cloths to dry herself with, so she grabbed her sheets from the hammock. They smelled of salt and mildew. And unwashed hair. _Do I smell like that?_ She did not care; she was a ranger, she had smelled worse. 

“That’s what I’m asking you,” she said. “Why did you think it was the right thing?”

For many heartbeats Modera did not answer, and Vereesa wondered if she had offended yet again. When she did speak, her voice was quiet. “I was born in Alterac many, many moons ago. That was a different time.” Modera’s expression had turned wan and haunted. “My first husband—not Drenden, may he rest in peace—was a nobleman, King Vichaul’s cousin once removed. He was no Rhonin Redhair, Ranger-General. He was proud and powerful and angry. I felt the weight of his anger often, I assure you.”

“I had no idea,” Vereesa said. “I am sorry.”

“As was I. But I had the Gift. When that became apparent, my lord made it clear I had no place in the mountains, so I left. And I swore no one would again be master of me.”

A clean shirt was a pleasure so intense Vereesa shivered. She draped her blankets across the hammock and prayed they would dry. “This is a hard tale, Modera, but what does it have to do with Sunreaver?”

“Just this. Like you, I have no homeland anymore. I have had to make one stone by stone. And because I made it, I could hope that it would be a home worth living in, where people could work together, and all magi would be united by a common cause.” She shrugged. “To answer your question, I did truly feel the elven people were wronged by Dalaran much as I was wronged by Alterac. I wanted to make amends.”

Garithos, she knew it without having to ask. “It’s hardly the same thing. You were innocent, a helpless girl.”

“I was,” Modera said, “and no, you’re right, it’s not the same. Aethas—and his superiors, of course—disabused me of the notion that we could be friends again.” She covered her eyes. Her hand was thin, all tendons, and the skin was visibly cracked. “Still. It was a sweet dream, if fond.”

Rhonin’s dream. Vereesa waited, but the moment of exposure was clearly gone. Modera lowered her hand and said nothing more.

Vereesa realized she was still half naked and pulled undergarments and pants from the chest beneath her hammock. “And if the time comes when you have to kill one of your former friends? What then?”

“You are unjust to me. My heart is gentle.”

Gentle or treasonous. In the coming days the two might be much the same. But Vereesa knew better than to say so.

Modera glanced down, and her expression brightened. She let out a peal of shocked laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Vereesa asked, chagrined. She looked down as well and saw nothing. 

“You put on your pants two legs at a time?” Modera sounded incredulous. “Truly?”

Vereesa flushed. Rhonin had teased her about the same thing, endlessly. “The Ranger-General jumps into her pants,” he would say. “This should be common knowledge in Silvermoon.” Vereesa had let it be known that the penalty for divulging the information would be death, but that only made him laugh harder.

“I’ve dressed in here a dozen times, and you only notice this now?”

Modera’s mouth twitched. “Truly, Ranger-General, there is much I do not know about you.”

“Nor will you ever,” Vereesa said. Modera’s laughter was not like Rhonin’s. Modera’s laughter had a sharp edge to it, nettling. But Rhonin was dead, and she was one of his heirs. _I swore to serve Dalaran. I swore to serve my people. This is how I will serve them if I must._ With mockery and scorn and her own resignation. Sometimes, perhaps, with honour.

* * *

The storm did not end, but as they approached the isle they reached a point where the winds dropped and the rains ceased and all around them the sea was a hot, swollen bulb.

Overhead the sky had the solidity of a vault. Vereesa went out on deck, sticky and irritable, Quel’Delar banging against her thigh. Jaina was already there. Her back was to Vereesa, but her stance spoke of weariness and a hard voyage.

_She is a sailor at heart. Whatever the hardness was, she carries it from Dalaran._

They stood together in silence, watching the horizon.

“It’s good to be in this new land,” Jaina said. Her voice was loud in the stillness. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”

“I know,” Vereesa said.

Jaina looked at her sideways, from the corners of her eyes. “Narasi told me you don’t agree with all of my methods. I’ve been thinking about that often, lately.”

Jaina spoke what she thought without cruelty and without heat. Such speaking came from a place of strength.

“Archmage Proudmoore.” Vereesa said it with all the respect she could muster. The day was so damn hot. “Narasi told you the truth. There were things that happened that night that I wish hadn’t happened, but they did, and it’s done. Our city belongs to the Alliance, and so do we.”

“Rhonin didn’t think so.”

“Rhonin’s idealism blinded him to the truth.” It hurt to speak ill of him, but it was a good hurt, and satisfying. A reminder of his mortality, perhaps, that he was only a man and so life could carry on without him. “You do. You saw what needed to be done.”

Jaina turned towards her fully, expression raw. “And you don’t revile me for it.”

“I doubt I could. You _are_ Dalaran. And I serve Dalaran.”

Jaina swallowed thickly. “I told you this before. I’ll say it again. You have two children, without a father thanks to Hellscream’s treachery. If you want to go back, I’m the last person to hold it against you. Dalaran will _always_ have a place for you in it, no matter what. You’ve been a true friend to the Alliance. And to me." 

For a heartbeat Vereesa was tempted. It would be a simple matter for an archmage of Jaina’s calibre to open a portal, once they made landfall, perhaps, or even before. She could see her children, stroke their hair, fall asleep listening to the sound of their breathing. If she stayed away too long she would return to find them strangers, grown up, grown alien. Human blood was changeable by its nature, and they were half human. Half human and half her.

But before her, the closed sheet of sea and sky. And before her, Jaina. And by her side, the sword. It did not forget. _It chose me because I do what I must. I never recoil, no matter how badly I’ve wanted to._ She had followed her heart all her life. Now she must follow duty.

“I have chosen my master.” She bowed as low as she could. “There is no shame for me. Where you lead, I’ll follow.”

Jaina touched her shoulder, hesitantly at first, but when Vereesa did not pull away her grip tightened until it was almost painful. She could feel Jaina’s joints, protruding through skin and the thick fabric of her gloves; she could feel the edge of her nails, more hard than sharp. It hurt, but it was a good hurt, and purifying. 

“Nor for me, my friend,” Jaina said. “Nor any shame for me.” 

**The End**

 


End file.
